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The idea behind this blog is to collect information on the death penalty in India and make it accessible. We are trying our best to put the latest information on the people who are currently on death row, the status of their cases, their mercy petitions and also the information on any death sentence across the country. Please feel free to write us and give us your suggestions and comments and also any information you have come across regarding the death penalty in India. Our email id is abolishdeathpenaltyindia@gmail.com The blog is currently managed by Grace Pelly, Lara Jesani, Nitu Sanadhya, Rebecca Gonsalvez, Reena Mary George and Vijay Hiremath.
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Thursday, May 28, 2015

SC awards death penalty to woman and her lover

NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court on Friday imposed death sentences on a woman and her lover who wiped out her entire family -- parents, two brothers, sister-in-law and two minors - after heavily sedating them to remove opposition to their love affair and also to grab the family property.

Supreme Court on Friday imposed death sentences on a woman and her lover who wiped out her entire family.

The apex court, which is generally lenient in awarding sentence to women convicts and of late has been increasingly reluctant to impose capital punishment, was shocked by the brutality of the crime.

A bench of Chief Justice H L Dattu and Justices S A Bobde and Arun Mishra dismissed the appeals of Shabnam and her lover Saleem and upheld the death penalty imposed on them by a UP trial court which was confirmed by the Allahabad HC.

Writing the judgment for the bench, Justice Dattu said, "Here is a case where the daughter Shabnam, who has been brought up in an educated and independent environment by her family and was respectfully employed as a teacher, influenced by the love and lust of her paramour has committed this brutal parricide (act of killing one's father, mother or other close relative), exterminating seven lives including that of a 10-month-old innocent child."

Shabnam, who was pregnant at the time of crime, had conspired with her unemployed lover Saleem and had served tea heavily laced with sedatives to her family members on the night of April 14, 2008. Saleem entered the house at Bahman Garhi in Amroha and the two slit the throats of the seven family members. She strangulated the 10-month-old child.

The CJI said, "Not only did she forget her love and duty towards her family, but also perpetrated the multiple homicides in her own house so as to fulfill her desire to be with the co-accused Saleem and grab the property leaving no heir but herself. Both the appellants wrench the heart of our society where family is an institution of love and trust, which they have disrespected and corrupted for the sake of their love affair."

Amicus curiae Dushyant Parashar pleaded with the court that Shabnam, who was pregnant at the time of crime, was now the mother of a five-year-old child, who would be orphaned if both she and Saleem were awarded death penalty. He had pleaded for life sentence for the couple citing their young age.

The court rejected the plea. It said Indian society has experienced through centuries that daughters were more caring than sons towards their parents and feel the pinch more when the relationship with parents go awry.

It said a daughter was a care-giver and a supporter, a gentle hand and responsible voice, an embodiment of the cherished values of our society and in whom a parent placed blind faith and trust. The bench said society abhorred parricide as a person trusted blindly could not be seen to murder those who trusted him/her.

Parricide assumes indescribable ghastliness when a teacher-daughter murders her teacher-father and her entire family, the bench said. "It is the combined concoction of all aggravating circumstances, that is, victims of the crime, motive for commission of murders, manner of execution, magnitude of crime and remorseless attitude of the appellants-accused that stands before us in this case," the bench said and rejected the plea for award of life sentence to the convicts.

Past sentences

* Renuka Shinde and her step-sister Seema Gavit were convicted in 2001 for kidnapping 13 children, forcing them to join a gang of thieves and murdering at least five of them. Shinde, 45, and Gavit, 39, were found guilty of kidnapping the 13 children in Maharashtra. They were initially accused of murdering nine of their victims, but prosecutors were only able to prove that they killed five. The Supreme Court upheld their sentence in 2006. The President rejected their mercy pleas last year.

* Sonia and her husband were awarded death penalty by the SC in 2007 for murdering her father, mother, sister, step-brother and the entire family including three young children - one 45 days old, another two-and-a-half-year-old and the third four years old to resist her father's decision to give the property to her stepbrother.

* Shabnam is the third to be awarded death penalty in the last decade.

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The Death Penalty Scenario in India

The Indian government is committed to the retention of the death penalty. In December 2007 India was among the minority of countries who voted at the United Nations General Assembly against a moratorium on executions.

India retains the death penalty as punishment for a number of crimes including murder, kidnapping, terrorism, desertion, inducement to suicide of a minor or a mentally-retarded person and has more recently in 2013 come to include the offence of rape in certain circumstances. It is mandatory for second convictions for drug trafficking offences.

Death sentences are carried out by hanging. In 1983 the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of this method, stating that it: “involves no barbarity, torture or degradation.”

After observing an unofficial moratorium of 8 years in India, the Indian Government in November 2012 carried out the execution of Ajmal Kasab, convicted in the Mumbai attacks case, without public knowledge. This was followed by the secret execution of Afzal Guru, convicted in the Parliament attack case of 2001, in February 2013, under similar circumstances, without intimating his immediate family or affording a chance of judicial review. In both cases, the executions were carried out under covert operations conducted by the Government immediately upon rejection of their mercy petitions. Before these executions, the last execution to be carried out in India was that of Dhananjoy Chatterjee in 2004 who was convicted of rape and murder and which sentence was carried out after he had spent 13 years in solitary confinement.

Following this, several mercy petitions of death row convicts have come to be rejected. The fear of execution of such convicts is imminent. Bolstered by the Government's unapologetic conduct and public outcry, especially in recent cases of rape and murder reported in the country, the courts are continuing to hand down death sentences at an alarming rate.

There is very little information on the number of people sentenced to death in India. According to the National Crime Records Bureau, 1,455 convicts were awarded the death penalty during the period 2001-2011. The actual figure of sentences originally awarded is much higher considering the death sentences of 4,321 convicts came to be commuted to life imprisonment in the said period.

That the imposition of death penalty is ineffective in controlling crime rate or deterring crimes, is widely known and even accepted on the basis of exhaustive research and statistics. Inherently there are serious flaws in capital sentencing. DNA evidence is not used, death sentences can be given by a majority rather than a unanimous bench and many convictions for death sentences are based entirely on circumstantial evidence. This coupled with a faulty criminal law enforcement system and admittedly high corruption levels in the police force investigating the crime, increases the chances of false convictions. In such a scenario, the correctness of conviction resulting in the ultimate sentence of capital punishment relies on a system of trial and error.

Also, the handing over of the death penalty is dependent on various variable factors such as existing biases amongst law enforcers, social biases, media reports and public outcry, social and financial status of the accused, quality of legal representation and last but not the least, the bent of mind of the judges.

During the 1980s the Supreme Court sought to restrict the use of the death penalty by characterizing it as a punishment reserved only for the “rarest of the rare” cases. The doctrine has not had the desired effect. According to a former chief justice of the Delhi High Court, Rajindar Sachar: “after the rarest of rare doctrine was introduced in 1980, the Supreme Court confirmed death penalty in 40 per cent of cases in the period 1980-90 while it was 37.7 per cent between 1970 and 1980. For the high courts it rose from 59 per cent in 1970-80 to 65 per cent during 1980-90”. Over the past two decades the death penalty has been extended to include more crimes and been handed down with increasing frequency.

Paradoxically, whilst the “rarest of the rare” doctrine has been used to limit and restrict the use of the mandatory death penalty elsewhere in the world, it has often had the opposite effect in India. It has enabled judges to justify imposing sentences of death in an arbitrary manner, reinforcing the deeply flawed character of capital punishment in India today.

Recently in April 2013, in a petition filed by Devender Pal Singh Bhullar in the Supreme Court, delay in deciding his clemency plea was ruled out as a ground to commute his death sentence to life imprisonment. Devender Pal Singh Bhullar had approached the Supreme Court in 2011 after the President rejected his mercy petition after 8 years. The said judgment may have a far reaching effect on similar cases where mercy petitions have remained pending with the President for inordinate periods of time.